Page 22 of Kane's Kingdom

"Yes."

There's no anger or challenge in the answer, only truth. I take her hand and lead her down the hall.

The clubhouse is never completely asleep. Somebody shifts on a couch. A door closes upstairs. Floorboards complain under our feet. Bella walks beside me anyway.

In my room, she turns before I can close the door and reaches for me. We undress each other slowly.

Her fingers trace the ink across my chest, then the chain at my neck. She doesn't ask about it. I'm grateful, because if she asks I might tell her everything.

How I wore it under my shirt when I took my first beating for refusing to obey my father. How I touched it the night Red lost his patch. How many women I left before morning because none of them were her.

Instead, I kiss her palm, then her wrist and her throat.

I lay her on my bed and learn her without anger between us. I press my mouth to the hollow of her throat and feel her breath catch. I trace my tongue along the line of her collarbone and feel her fingers tighten in the sheets. When I move lower, I take mytime. I kiss the curve of each breast, the dip of her waist, the inside of her thigh, until she's arching beneath me and saying my name like it's the only word she knows.

When I settle between her thighs and use my mouth on her, she tries not to be loud. I make it impossible. I don't let her hide from me this time.

When she comes, her fingers lock in my hair and her thighs tremble around my shoulders. I move up her body, kissing every place I can reach.

She pushes at my chest until I'm on my back.

"What are you doing?"

"Being unreasonable."

The sight nearly kills me. She straddles me and takes her time returning everything I gave her, her mouth on my throat, nails down my stomach and hand closing around me until control turns thin.

She lowers onto me inch by inch. Every muscle in my body locks.

Her eyes stay on mine. There's no mistake this time and nowhere to hide.

I grip her hips and let her set the pace until neither of us can stand it. Then I roll us, pinning her beneath me. She welcomes the weight.

I move slowly at first, deep and controlled, feeling every inch of her close around me. Her breath shudders against my throat. I pull back and push in again, deeper, and the sound she makes is raw enough to go straight through me. Bella wraps herself around me.

"Stop holding back."

"I'm trying not to hurt you."

"You won't."

The words tear the last of my control loose. I take her harder. Her nails rake down my back, and I feel the sting of it like permission.

Her mouth opens on a broken sound. I kiss it away, hand sliding between us until she comes around me. I follow with my face buried against her neck and twenty years of wanting her burning through every nerve I've got.

Afterward, neither of us moves away. We sleep, wake and reach for each other again, slower and quieter.

By the third time, dawn grays the window. When I wake, Bella is curled against my side, her hair over my shoulder and one hand resting on the pendant like it belongs there.

Outside, boots pass and somebody starts the coffee. One brother laughs, low and knowing, before another tells him to shut the hell up. They know where I slept and that she stayed, and for once I don't care what the club makes of it.

Bella was the first girl I ever wanted and the only woman I ever loved. She's asleep in my bed, wearing my scent on her skin, and every rule I built to keep myself from taking this is gone. I should want the discipline back, but I don't.

FIVE

BELLA

The morning after Kane sleeps in his own bed, every man in the clubhouse knows it. Conversations pause when I cross the common room at five-thirty, and Cash's smirk disappears the moment Kane looks his way.